Rethinking the Freelance Life, Part Two: The Way Clients Work with Us

Last week, I wrote about how freelancers could benefit from re-framing the way they think about their relationships with clients. This week, we look at the other end of the relationship: clients.

The motivations to hire a freelancer vary on a case by case basis, but usually a client chooses to hire a freelancer for one of the following reasons:

1. The client needs to supplement an existing team with an additional resource for a short period of time.
2. The client has a long term need for a resource but that need doesn't necessarily require full-time employment.
3. The client needs the fresh perspective of an outside consultant to shake-up the status quo of the company.
4. The client is a small business owner and hiring a full-time resource doesn't make sense financially.

And all of these are reasonable justifications for seeking out a freelancer. To make the most of your investment in a freelancer, from the vantage point of a client, the way you think about your relationship with that freelancer is critical. Thinking of freelancers as vendors is tempting. In many cases, they provide short term support on a project by project basis, so the exchange often feels like a purchase of goods.

This is a missed opportunity for everyone involved and can hurt your bottom line. When you think of a freelancer as a vendor rather than a partner or a team member, you undermine the potential of your collaboration from the very start. When you treat a freelancer as a partner in your success, you set the stage for a meaningful, productive relationship. Consider these points:

• Integrating a freelancer into your team and making him or her feel as though they are a stakeholder in the success of your business helps to make the work more meaningful for the freelancer. Essentially, if you make a freelancer feel like he or she matters, you will see that passion shine through in the final product.
• Freelancers have the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects and within a number of companies, giving them unique perspectives on problems and challenges. Given the opportunity, a freelancer could bring a new solution to the table that moves the needle.
• Don't be afraid of a freelancer that challenges the way your team thinks (in a respectful way of course). If you ask a freelancer for his or her opinion or thoughts, be willing to consider new ideas, even if they scare at you first.
• Though the project at hand might have your immediate focus, engage freelancers as though you plan to hire them again in the future. You never know when you might need them, and you're better off working with someone that is familiar with you, with how your business works, and with your goals instead of starting over with a new resource.

For these points to ring true, for them to be viable options, requires a high level of trust. You wouldn't trust just anyone to contribute to the direction of your business, and you shouldn't. Engaging the right freelancers sets the stage for the points outlined above, so be just as rigorous with your freelance selection process as you are with your full-time hiring process.

Ultimately, you hire freelancers because you want to make a difference in your business. Don't forget to empower them to make that difference.

Rethinking the Freelance Life, Part One: Our Work with Clients

Freelancing has been my life for the last eight years. My unwavering passion for all things writing—a career path not exactly known for fulltime, long-term employment—collided with an economic trend toward hiring contract workers and temporary employees, one of the many job-related challenges facing my generation.

For me, it’s worked out, and I’ve come to enjoy the freelance lifestyle. I have a calendar full of appointments and assignments. I’m paying my rent. And I’m working with interesting, passionate clients on a variety of projects.

In that time, I have also had the opportunity to collaborate with other freelancers, from designers to programmers to fellow writers. In every case, I learned a lot from these people and have had very few bad experiences. I’ve noticed, though, a common line of thinking amongst many freelancers (not all): they compare themselves to pirates.

The philosophy, as it was explained to me once, goes like this:

“We’re pirates. We sail from project to project collecting treasure where there is treasure to be had. We join forces with other pirates when the treasure is too big for one pirate, we go our separate ways when the project is done, and since we are all pirates, we will mutiny if the leader isn’t doing his job.”

It’s a romantic view. Pirates are free and independent. They chase adventure. They are risk-takers and visionaries because they have chosen the freelance path. It’s a sink or swim life, so if you meet a veteran freelancer you know that he or she has had the chops, the creativity, and the mettle to succeed in a challenging environment.

I’m fine with being proud of and enamored with the independence and challenge of freelancing. Where I get uncomfortable, however, is equating clients with treasure. In the pirate metaphor, this starts to suggest that clients are ports to be plundered. Do the job, get the loot, and get out.

Fans of the pirate metaphor may rightly argue that they never meant it that way, and I would believe them, but I argue that the picture you paint of yourself can easily become your reality if you’re not careful. If you’re a leader, the young and impressionable around you may buy into the picture as well, taking the painting for face-value regardless of your original meaning and its caveats.

The best freelancers I’ve met and worked with behave less like pirates and more like helpful neighbors. Their permanent business residences may be their own, but they are active, contributing members of their communities. They go where they are needed and fill the gaps. Sometimes the projects are big. Sometimes they are small. Sometimes the freelancer is the leader of the team because he or she is the expert, and sometimes he or she is following the lead of someone within the company. The freelancer could be there for a month, or maybe a year, or maybe he or she pops in and out for the foreseeable future.

While they are doing their work though, the most effective freelancers aren’t fixated on plunder like a pirate might be. They are getting paid, yes, but their focus is on doing what’s best for their clients. They want to leave their clients better off than when the project first began, and they are respectful of client limitations like budget and bandwidth. They might be able to squeeze a few more coppers out of the deal, but they establish reasonable scopes for their work because the clients are often better off.

A pirate asks for more budget for the sake of a bigger paycheck. A neighbor asks for more budget for the sake of capitalizing on an authentic, viable opportunity.

It may not sound romantic or exciting, but people are more likely to trust and collaborate with a neighbor than a bandit that sails in, fills his ship with treasure, and disappears when there is nothing left to loot.

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Brand

I talk to a lot of business owners about social media marketing. It comes up just as often in casual settings as it does in formal meetings because business owners have been hearing for years that social media can change the way they do business. Gurus and experts and marketing executives have portrayed social media as a magic bullet for generating interest in the products or services that you offer.

There are no magic bullets. Ever.

But people, especially passionate business owners, want to believe that there are, which has created an unfortunate situation where the loudest marketers have convinced businesses to buy into the notion that social media can create instant returns. Since these marketers are often trying to sell their services to clients, they also encourage businesses to adopt a slew of social media platforms because why settle for one magic bullet when you can have seven?

I'm sure you've seen it. You log into a company's website and you see a caterpillar-looking collection of social media icons in the header: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+.

Are these platforms full of potential customers? Almost definitely (looking at you with a great deal of suspicion, Google+). Does using every platform available make sense for your business? Probably not. Here's why:

1. Every social media property you connect to your brand is both an opportunity and a liability. An out-of-date profile reflects poorly on your business, and if you aren't checking each platform regularly you could miss out on a customer inquiry or complaint, poisoning what was once an opportunity to use social media as a means of providing great customer service.
2. For many businesses, even large ones, time is precious. If you don't have the time to manage seven social media properties, take the practical route and only take on what you can realistically handle.
3. The latest and greatest social media platform may not make sense for your business. For example, Pinterest is currently the leader in social media conversion, but if you are selling construction equipment, you probably won't find a sizable chunk of your target audience using Pinterest. And that's okay. When you are choosing platforms for your business, use what you know about your target audiences to identify which platforms they are likely to use.
4. It's better for your brand if you do one or two things really well than to be barely mediocre at seven or eight. Ultimately, social media is an opportunity to connect directly with your customers. In that spirit, you are probably better off focusing your efforts in less places so that you can create the best experience possible for your audience.

In the interest of full-disclosure, a big part of my consulting work involves social media, and I often recommend that my clients continue incorporating it to some degree into their marketing mix. That said, in the last week alone, I've talked with two different clients about what makes the most sense for their particular businesses. In one case, we decided that LinkedIn was a good fit for connecting with their customers and Facebook was a good way to continue fostering a positive work environment. In the other case, we decided that some basic LinkedIn activity was the most practical option both for their target audience and for their resources as a business.

Every business is different, so be wary of one-size-fits-all solutions. Your business deserves better.

The Danger of Blindly Chasing Marketing Metrics

Data is powerful. It drives the scientific process. It helps us cut through the amorphousness of anecdotal insights so that we can base judgments and decisions on concrete, verifiable information. At the same time though, data can be manipulated. So for as much as we look to data to tell us the real story about a study, or in our case a marketing effort, we should have the presence of mind to see the big picture that data fits into.

If the sole purpose of your communications efforts is to boost metrics, you end up chasing numbers, not people.

For example, the photo above appeared on my LinkedIn feed today, and I've seen variations of this "challenge" on Facebook pages for a variety of brands. Even though the tactic is aging, it is still an effective way to inflate metrics. People respond (for some reason), throwing in their one word replies in quick succession. With this activity, engagement and traffic metrics go up, so at the end of the month when the communications manager develops her report, she can point to the boost as evidence of her doing a good job.

"Look at how many comments we got!"

But it's meaningless engagement. The discussion isn't relevant to the brand, and even though people are participating, it's mostly mindless. There is no value.

And most marketers would agree, but meaningless engagement can come in more convincing disguises. As an example, when I launched a crowd funding campaign to launch a book project with a friend, we ran a giveaway via his Facebook page. The post received 116 likes, 127 comments, and 11 shares, making it one of his most active posts ever. Despite the jump in metrics, however, we lost money on the giveaway. We didn't receive a single contribution from the effort. Not one. The metrics looked great, but the activity constituted zero value for the brand or for our efforts.

Even a simple metric like the size of your audience, whether it's based on web traffic or the number of your Facebook likes, can become useless if your focus is exclusively on making the number go up. To return to the Facebook example, mindlessly buying likes can certainly make a page look good, but it can hurt your ability to communicate with the people that actually care about what you do.

And that's what the real focus should be: communicating with the people that care in a meaningful way. If you use metrics as a tool for measuring how well you've done that, you are on the right track because your data is grounded in the right context. Statements along the lines of "We need more likes" or "Our reach is down 5%" or "We need to make 10 posts a week" are symptoms of metric-chasing.

Instead, pursue the meaningful. Give your audience relevant, worthwhile content. Make metrics a tool for accomplishing that goal rather than the goal itself.

Crowdfunding: Lessons Learned from a Successful Campaign

In recent years, the popularity of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter has grown rapidly. Small businesses and independent artists initially turned to crowdfunding to mitigate the initial financial risk of a new project or product. With crowdfunding, the money could be raised before the project began, eliminating the potentially catastrophe of investing in something that ultimately no one cared for.

Soon, crowdfunding spawned a new way of doing business. Not only did it help reduce the financial burden for business owners, it became a way to generate publicity and to engage fans, old and new alike. With most crowdfunding sites following the Kickstarter model where funds are only released if the goals (otherwise they are returned to donors), fans are motivated to share and talk about the project they funded. Donating makes you a stakeholder in the project. If you want to see the project realized and delivered, you are inclined to tell your network about it so that more people will contribute.

This relationship between donors and campaigners naturally leads to authentic, organic word-of-mouth marketing. Furthermore, the nature of crowdfunding encourages campaigners to put their donors first and to really think about what excites their target audience. Because of perks--the rewards that people get for donating a particular amount of money--campaigners have an opportunity to give back to their fans. This is a unique way to create hardcore, true fans, the value of which is becoming increasingly obvious to marketers.

Recently, my publishing start-up Artechoke Media ran an Indiegogo campaign to fund our first collaboration with the well-known blogger Matt "Aesopian" Kirtley (prior to this, we released two books for free). As of the publishing of this post, we have seven days left, but we've already surpassed our goal of $4,000 and are continuing to raise more money to invest in future projects with other instructors.

Whether you are a fellow jiu-jitsu enthusiast or a creative that is looking to get an idea off of the ground, I've assembled some thoughts on what I feel made our campaign a success and what I would do differently in the future. This is far from a definitive guide to crowdfunding, but I hope that it will help someone to realize their dreams.

What We Did Well:

1. People knew us and knew that we were credible. Matt and I are far from celebrities, but we have been working in the jiu-jitsu world for some time. Matt has been blogging for over ten years and has been active in every major online jiu-jitsu community in that time. People know his content and recognize his name. For me, I have been writing about jiu-jitsu for a while as well, and have been fortunate enough to work on some big books with some big names. My name is not as recognizable as Matt's, but a good portion of the community is familiar with my work. When people know that you can deliver on your promises, they are more inclined to donate. This is one of the reasons why Red Belt, another jiu-jitsu Indiegogo campaign, was successful as well.
2. We established a positive reputation in the community. In the time that Matt has been blogging, he has never sold a product or demanded that people pay for his content. He had a small donation button and pumped out material regardless of how much money he made or didn't make. When we announced our campaign, people remembered this and commented on it frequently. They knew that Matt had been generous with the community, so the community was generous with him. For my part, I released content for free as well, which included a two free books, one a humor book about jiu-jitsu culture and the other a free instructional that demonstrated what we wanted to do.
3. We had a network of super friends that were willing to help. Despite our established reputations, we could not have reached our goal without the help of generous leaders within our community. Bloggers, podcasters, instructors, and business owners lent us their platforms to help us generate awareness for the campaign. With each plug that we received, we saw a direct correlation in terms of campaign traffic and contributions. Having other respected people vouch for us in this way was absolutely critical.
4. We had a proof of concept that donors could test-drive. Releasing 3-D Jiu-Jitsu for free endeared us to fans, but perhaps more importantly it showed what we wanted to do and proved that we could, in fact, do it. With 3-D Jiu-Jitsu available for free, there was no question about what we planned to do. Had we simply described our model, our audience would be right to be skeptical and even a bit confused. Pointing to a sample boosted our credibility and helped to sell people on our project.
5. We asked for what we needed. Our goal of $4,000 was what we needed to make Matt's book. While a bigger budget would definitely be nice, we aren't interested in taking advantage of our target audience. By setting a reasonable goal, donors are more likely to contribute, and we are more likely to get the money that we needed.
6. We had a trove of content to share throughout the campaign. Rather than fill our social media with reminders to donate, we used the attention of the campaign as an excuse to release high quality content. Matt had seminar footage and podcasts that he shared, and I had content from previous projects that I could share as well. Again, we were giving our work away to build good will, but we are also starting conversations that people cared about.
7. We included an awesome video with our campaign. Nothing else to say about this because it was that awesome.

What We Could Have Done Better:

1. Our outreach was poorly scheduled. Though we had a number of community leaders promoting our Indiegogo, we didn't coordinate the coverage very well or give our friends much notice on what we had planned. We started contacting people about a week before we went live when we should have started planning coverage at least two weeks ahead of time. 
2. The progression of our perks wasn't optimized for maximum return. After our campaign began, a few veteran crowdfunders pointed out that the donation levels for our perks had some large gaps. Our minimum perk was $5, then $30, then $35, and then $99 and up. Had we offered a perk between $35 and $99, we might have captured more donations from people that wanted to give more than $35 but not as much as $99.
3. We offered few physical items as perks. This is primarily a result of our product being a multimedia rich e-book, a purely digital offering, but it still represents a missed opportunity. We avoided offering t-shirts or prints or posters because of fulfillment challenges. We didn't want to be on the hook for production and shipping. However, a physical perk like a t-shirt could have helped us flesh out our perk levels and also made donors feel like they were getting more out of their contributions.
4. We didn't plan for stretch goals. We fully expected to reach our goal, but we did not expect to surpass it significantly. Now, with seven days left and $570 in donations beyond our target (as of the writing of this post), it's clear that there is a significant interest in the types of products that we plan to produce. While we had plenty of ideas for other books that we'd like to develop, we didn't have an idea polished and ready to execute, leading to some late night discussions and planning where we ultimately decided that we'd rather make less money than rush a poor product idea to market and hurt our reputation.

If I return to crowdfunding in the future, whether with Artechoke Media or another project or client, the lessons that we learned from this effort will play a critical role in my planning and execution. If you are thinking about crowdfunding your own project, please feel free to email me or message me on Facebook to talk about your plans. Even if your project is not related to jiu-jitsu, I am happy to help.

7 Steps for Building Your Personal Brand

Recently, I’ve received a few emails and LinkedIn messages from recent graduates and soon-to-be graduates asking me about how to package themselves for the job market. This challenge is really personal branding in disguise, which is a topic familiar to successful entrepreneurs, authors, and celebrities, making it just as relevant to recent graduates as it is to professionals looking to attract more attention within their industries.

To start, a definition of personal branding from Wikipedia:

“Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.”

In short, marketers and business owners have come to accept that the value of a brand is held mostly in intangible assets, with some sources estimating that physical assets now account for only 40% of a brand’s worth. The other 60% is composed of brand perception, brand  personality, and brand loyalty. This is why people pay more for Apple products or why people say “hand me a Kleenex” as often as they say “hand me a tissue.” The brands that connect with consumers in meaningful ways have a huge advantage over brands that compete on a product level alone, and the profits of major brands speak to that in very clear terms.

Much of these concepts translate to personal branding. If you are trying to attract the attention of a recruiter for example, how you present yourself is just as important as what you present about yourself because the static in the job market is enormous. In 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that the average number of job applications hovered around 118. Anecdotally, that seems low, but that is still a large volume of candidates to compete against. Everyone is submitting a resume and a cover letter (a product). If you want to get hired, you need to stand out (with branding).

To get you started, here are 7 steps to launching your personal brand.

A Wild Writer Has Appeared

The challenge of being a writer: Everyone fancies themselves writers.

On the rare chance that I am invited to a party, someone inevitably tells me about the novel they have been working on for 15 years or about their niece’s plan to self-publish a series of fan-fiction. While I am supportive of people having creative hobbies—like painting or sculpting or writing—the sentiment that anyone can be a writer makes it difficult to convince clients, readers, or the people gawking at you at parties that your work as a writer is anything of consequence. After all, they could do what you.

They could write a book, if they had the time.

They could query a magazine and pitch an article, if they felt like it.

They could develop a content marketing strategy matched against an editorial calendar, if their job wasn’t already so demanding.

If you ever meet a writer or find yourself working with a writer for some professional purpose—perhaps your company hired an agency to develop copy for an ad campaign or perhaps your non-profit hired a grant writer to win a new source of funding—here are three points to help you get the most of the interaction.

Introducing My Portfolio

I’ve been a freelance writer since I was 19. The benefit of being a freelancer is that you can set your own schedule and work on a variety of projects of your choosing. The challenge of being a freelancer is that you have to set your own schedule and work on a variety of projects of your choosing.

To maintain that freedom without sinking into the horrible reality of the over-romanticized starving artist lifestyle, you have to hustle. You query magazines. You submit proposals. You network with advertising agencies and with corporate executives. Even when you have work, you have to look ahead to the end of the project, lining up your next assignment and the one after that as you complete your current task. If you don’t, you will soon find yourself without work, eating ramen for dinner, and asking your landlord if you can pay him in short stories (he will say no).

As soon as you stop hustling, you lose.

In my sprint to land the next assignment, to find bigger and bigger challenges, I haven’t taken the time to reflect. Writing has given me the opportunity to work with great people, and each project has taught me a great deal about my craft.

What started as a personal exercise—cataloging my work history—morphed into a detailed account of every assignment and client that I have taken on in my career. You can view the portfolio directory by clicking here, and from there you can explore individual projects at your leisure, complete with descriptions and work samples. For other writers, perhaps this will give you an idea of how to present your work. For anyone else viewing this portfolio, let me know if you have any questions about my work or if you see a way that I can help you tell your story.

The Eye Gouge That Went Viral, and Lessons Learned

Early last week, one of the companion videos for Don't Wear Your Gi to the Bar: And Other Jiu-Jitsu Life Lessons (my newest book) went viral. The video, a tongue-in-cheek montage about eye-gouging vs. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, racked up 10,000 views in three days, and the numbers are still climbing.

Viral content is a powerful way to spread a brand, and having the eye gouge video make the internet rounds has driven a significant volume of traffic to the Artechoke Media site, resulting in increased downloads of our e-book and driving sales of the softcover. As a content creator, seeing my material reach a massive audience is both gratifying and rewarding, intrinsically and financially. It fuels my motivation to continue creating, and it grows my brand.

Developing viral content, however, is not easy. After years of creating content, here's what I've learned, and I hope that it helps you in your content development.

1. The vast majority of your content will not go viral.

And that's okay. Between the Artechoke Media YouTube account and my personal YouTube account, I have uploaded 104 videos. Eight have broken 10,000 views, with the highest having over 600,000 views. I've written 75 blog posts for this blog, about 20 blog posts for Artechoke Media, and over 400 posts for Lockflow.com. Lockflow received a lot of traffic to begin with (2 to 4 million hits a month). Taking that into traffic volume into account, we had maybe twenty posts that went viral, shattering our average view numbers, over my two years there.

For a piece of content to go viral, it will likely have to connect to an audience larger than your immediate target, which is certainly good for your brand and your content, but maintaining a meaningful, consistent relationship with your audience is more important in the long run than a big surge of traffic in the short term. Your loyal core will support you, so continue to keep them happy with content that they enjoy, even if every piece isn't a record-setter. A few quality fans are more valuable than 10,000 fans with short attention spans (Kevin Kelly's piece on 1,000 true fans really drives this home).

2. Designing viral content is a matter of knowing what your audience likes to talk about.

Of the content that I've created that has gone viral, that accumulated a large volume of traffic over a short period of time, I had a pretty good idea beforehand that the content would stick because I was in tune with my audience. As a fight journalist, I am a part of the audience that I write for. I know what they'll like because I know what I like. When I see something that gets me excited, I can reasonably assume that the people that share my interests will get excited about it as well.

So when I interviewed Ryan Hall for Lockflow and he expressed some seemingly controversial views on jiu-jitsu technique, I knew that the combination of Hall's high profile and the discussion-potential of the interview would set the fight community a-buzz. When the article (and interview transcripts) went live, we were concerned that the server might not be able to handle the traffic. Our forums were on fire and communities around the net were discussing the article.

When I selected which behind the scenes videos to share from the making of Marcelo Garcia's Advanced Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I chose the ones where Marcelo expressed his views on incorporating certain techniques instead of others into his game. These perspectives are somewhat controversial in jiu-jitsu terms, but chasing controversy is not the key here. Chasing discussion is the key. Marcelo teaching a technique will definitely attract an audience, but videos worth talking about breed a stronger level of engagement. To prove this point, a video of Marcelo discussing Wrestling vs. Jiu-Jitsu garnered ten times as many views as a video of Marcelo simply teaching a crab-ride. The discussion in the comments of Wrestling vs. Jiu-Jitsu continues even still, two years later.

In the case of the eye-gouge video, we picked a topic that was both entertaining and discussion-worthy. Viewers would laugh, and they'd talk about the too-true events that inspired the making of the video.

3. Plant your content in active communities to create viral champions.

To get your content to go viral, you need to hand it off to vocal fans. These vocal fans, your champions, are the ones that are truly responsible for making your content go viral. If they love it enough, they will share it to their networks, write about it on their blogs, and post it to other online communities. From here, the snowball grows and grows as other vocal fans pick it up and do the same. Having a platform like a blog or a YouTube channel is an okay place to start this process, but to truly succeed, you should find online communities that would be interested in the content and share it there as well.

For the eye-gouge video, we posted it in /r/BJJ, a growing jiu-jitsu community, and the video spread from there. It's important to note, however, that I am an active member of /r/BJJ. I participate in discussions. I answer questions for new members. I upvote and share the content that other members post. I am a contributing member of the community because I am just as passionate about the subject matter as the other members. If I wasn't an active member, any posts I made to my own content would soon be seen as self-serving, and rightly so. Community is about giving, so if you want your planted content to grow, you should do the right thing and give as much as you can to the community first.

4. No matter what, focus on serving your core fan-base.

The more popular you get, the more people you will find that despise everything you do and write as though they would happily hit you with their car if they had the chance. I've received hate mail, 1-star reviews, downvotes, angry YouTube comments, and even a few viscous phone calls. Because of the eye-gouge video, dozens of martial arts groups and message boards are writing some pretty nasty things about my intelligence, my martial arts ability, and my credibility as a journalist.

This is inevitable. When you grow your audience, you will inevitably unearth more haters. Do your best to ignore them, focusing instead on the people that represent your target audience (if the majority of your target audience is critical of your work, consider their feedback). The internet is a haven for negativity, and part of growing your brand is learning to cope with that element.

Good luck with your content.

Why My New Book is Free

As you may have heard, my newest book is out. The print version is for sale on Amazon, and the e-book version is free to download and share. Don't Wear Your Gi to the Bar: And Other Jiu-Jitsu Life Lessons is a departure from the seriousness of jiu-jitsu training that explores the art, in a lighthearted way, that has captured our curiosity and passion.

But why is the e-book free?

I've gotten a lot of messages about this, and the answer has a lot of layers.

The top layer is that the jiu-jitsu community, from my perspective, is driven by conversation. We pass around YouTube videos, we share blog posts, we discuss techniques and events--it appears that the vast amount of jiu-jitsu information available is available for free. Jiu-jiteiros like to help other jiu-jiteiros, and this movement has been growing since jiu-jitsu first went online. Making Don't Wear Your Gi to the Bar free to download is my contribution to that community, giving back for what was given to me, and I'm honored to be a part of that tradition.

The layers below that are a bit more difficult to separate. On a philosophical level, I live my life by the idea that I take care of the people that take care of me. My fans take care of me, so I like to give back in anyway I can, even if it's something as small as a free book. But the inverse of that idea is also true. If you take care of someone, they are inclined to take care of you.

Therefore, giving this book away is an act of goodwill. If someone downloads it for free and likes it, they may be inclined to support my work in return. Whether that support is in the act of purchasing Don't Wear Your Gi to the Bar or sharing the free e-book with their own friends is irrelevant to me. As long as they supported the project in some way, I am content.

More and more independent authors are trying this approach, with admittedly mixed success. If you're a science fiction reader, you probably know that Cory Doctorow is one of the most vocal advocates of this tactic, and his position is backed by growing body of scholarly research that supports a singular hypothesis: giving away free e-books increases print sales.

It's nice when the science supports the sentiment. Doing good for others means that they are likely to do good for you.

Download your copy of Don't Wear Your Gi to the Bar today, and share it with your friends.

4 Steps for Launching Your Writing Career

My writing mentor, Alan Natali.

Mentoring new writers is an important part of my life. It’s a tradition that I take seriously because my mentor, Alan Natali, bestowed it upon me. His mentor, the late Ron Forsythe, had passed the tradition on to him.

“Don’t thank me for helping you,” Alan once told me. “Someone did for me what I did for you, so it’s your job to pass it on to someone else now. That’s how it has to work.”

And so, like a jiu-jitsu lineage, I work to give to others what was given to me.

I have helped a few young writers get their start, and one fight writer has worked with me closely over the last year, but I am interested in helping more. As much as I would enjoy teaching a class on writing, that’s not a possibility right now, but I can teach you how to begin establishing your writing career. It’s not easy, but having an idea of what to do and where to start puts you ahead of most aspiring writers. These four tips are a start, a jumping off point.

1. Learn to write.

You can learn to write without going to college, but the structure of a class guided by the insight of a professional writer will advance your writing far more quickly than trying to trial-and-error your way to being a better writer. Learning to write by reading great writing is certainly effective, but that approach requires a bit more effort than simply reading. I plan to cover this topic in a future post.

2. Establish a professional presence.

Setup a LinkedIn profile, a website, and become proficient in the query letter. Your LinkedIn profile and your website should present you in a good light and should be used as tools for expanding your network. The query letter is an art in itself, but you should be able to write an email that succinctly and expertly introduces your content idea, explains why that idea is an ideal fit for a target publication, and then demonstrates why you are the best writer for executing that idea.

3. Build your portfolio.

Your portfolio will begin with high quality writing samples that you created for pleasure. Then you will most likely write for free to amass a collection of published clips. With those published clips, you have the foundation to seek out and demand paying assignments. Rule: once you get paid, always get paid. Do not go back to writing for free after someone has paid you, no matter how small that pay may have been.

Finding places to publish your work for free is not terribly difficult. You should be able to find multiple websites and independent publications within your target genre that are looking for quality content but do not have a budget to pay writers. Pitch some ideas to their editors and start to grow your portfolio. The process for finding paying work is some similar, but start with small publications and work your way into steadily larger and larger publications.

Think of the well-paying writing jobs as the point of a pyramid. You have to lay a lot of stones in multiple levels to build a pyramid of work that reaches as high as that point. Do some people skip to the top? Yes, but you should never count on being the exception. Keep pushing to outdo your last publication, keep pushing to get published in larger, more prestigious markets.

4. Treat writing like a job.

Treat your writing more like a job and less like art. If you are going to be a career writer, you cannot wait for inspiration (for the record, I have not been “inspired” to write since April of 2008). You have to develop the discipline and the process to write without a muse speaking to you so that you can consistently develop content over long periods of time. For this reason, I tend to avoid settings where the more spiritual writers gather, like writing groups or workshops. To me, it’s not about “feel” or “flow.” Good writing is a craft, like carpentry. When done well, it’s beautiful and artistic, but very particular factors make a table a successful table.

So learn to step into your workshop and to start planning and measuring your pieces. I offend many writers when I talk like this. Art can come from work; lest we forget that the Sistine Chapel was not a product of inspiration but rather a commissioned project. If I didn’t make myself think about writing this way, I would not be able to write for 50-60 hours a week.

Good luck. If you have any questions, please ask via the comments below or via my Facebook page.

The Future of Instructional Books

Publishing is changing.

That is not news. The industry has been in disarray for the better part of a decade, or maybe longer depending on how you look at it. As soon as Amazon entered the market, the brick-and-mortar distribution model began to crumble, and then e-books and on-demand printing followed not long after. Borders closed up shop, and Barnes & Noble is uncertain about its future.

Readers are consuming content in different ways, and the old guard is hesitant to admit that their original recipe might not match current tastes as well as it once did.

We’ve seen this shift in the world of jiu-jitsu publishing as well. The use of on-demand content sites appears to be growing, if the proliferation of such sites is any indication. MGInAction.com was once the lone player in the jiu-jitsu video on-demand market, but now Andre Galvao, the Mendes brothers, Eddie Bravo, and the Ribeiro brothers have entered the market as well.

The benefits seem clear for everyone involved: instructors can generate more consistent revenue more quickly and users can enjoy a quicker turn-around in new material and wider variety of content. The focus of DVDs and books tends to be narrow, and the production time can take months or even years. The video on-demand model is successful for many of the same reasons that YouTube as a service is successful: content is updated almost daily and the material is easy to digest.

Other jiu-jitsu content producers are taking advantage of digital distribution in a different way. Where Stephan Kesting and Roy Dean produced DVDs they are now producing apps. Budovideos has also taken note of this shift and being pushing its own digital versions of instructionals, seminars, and competition footage.

When I was the Editor-in-Chief at Lockflow.com, I saw the shift from photo by photo instructionals to YouTube videos, and it seems that this shift has touched every corner of jiu-jitsu instructionals, whether that content is being consumed on YouTube, in an app, or through an on-demand service—large numbers of short, specific videos.

This change in paradigm has some proclaiming that books are dead or dying. I don’t think that’s the case.

The written word, regardless of genre, can accomplish things that video and pictures cannot. In terms of jiu-jitsu instructionals, videos are great for demonstrating movement and for mimicking that personal delivery of information that we’ve become accustomed to on the mat. Video’s weakness, however, is its ability to organize and to synergize concepts and theory. When the discussion of idea becomes more lofty than a simple how-to, the edited and revised delivery of text makes it easier to present that information where a stumble in speech can muddle and confuse.

Again, not a new observation. Successful jiu-jitsu blogs like Aesopian.com and the Jiu-Jitsu Laboratory have proven this notion to be true over and over again for years, and their popularity suggests that a mixed-media delivery of technical information resonates with jiu-jiteiros worldwide. Grapplers love short videos that explain technique, but they also love exploring the depth of their art.

Jiu-jitsu instructional books may be falling from favor now, but that fall won’t be permanent. The written word has not become weaker. In fact, more people are reading now than ever with the spread of smartphones and mobile devices. The container that we call a book and the way we’ll deliver will need to evolve, but books aren’t dead.

This is a challenge that I’ve spent some time exploring, and I think I have the solution. It’s much more complex than simple coupling video with text, which I’ve been doing with Artechoke in a Can and which many others have done before, but it’s also not terribly complex. I’m looking forward to sharing that solution with you this summer.

Social Media for Jiu-Jitsu Gyms (3 Parts)

This article was originally published by BJJ Weekly in three parts. The impetus for writing it came from both my jiu-jitsu travels and my work as a fight writer. I've had the pleasure of networking with a great many students and instructors, which has exposed me to their marketing efforts and their social media efforts. I see a lot of talented instructors with awesome students struggling to attract new students to their gym. That makes me sad. I believe that jiu-jitsu can be for everybody, and the fact that there are people out there that may never get the chance to try it because nobody told them about it is tragic.

I owe my humble success to online communities. Were it not for the support of Charles Pearson at Lockflow.com and the support of the Lockflow community, my writing career may have never gotten off the ground. I will also take a little bit of credit for Lockflow's expansion on to social media, which included weekly podcasts and fight of the week videos when I was working there full time.

Part 3 of Using Social Media to Grow Your Gym

Read the entirety of part 3 by clicking here.

For the last two weeks, we have been talking about how to use social media to strengthen your community and create a lifestyle that persists outside of your gym. To make this guide more concrete, we have been referencing the social media campaign of Junior Achievement, using their challenges and their successes with online communities as a framework for jiu-jitsu communities.

Once you have created advocates and built an online community that reflects your offline community, the next step is to empower your advocates to spread the word about your gym for you.

When I reached this point with Junior Achievement’s fundraiser, we had built up so much momentum that advocates gladly promoted the fundraiser and related events to their friends and followers. Multiple journalists and bloggers wrote about the fundraiser and tweeted about it. Our Facebook and Twitter followers shared and retweeted our updates. And local celebrities plugged Junior Achievement through their websites and social media. On this front, Pittsburgh Dad was the highlight. If you don’t know Pittsburgh Dad, you’re probably not from Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh Dad YouTube videos have become a part of the local culture, and his following is enormous. When he posted about the fundraiser, our revenue skyrocketed almost instantly.

Part 2 of my BJJ Weekly on Using Social Media to Grow Your Gym

Read the full article at BJJ Weekly.

Last week, we talked about the basic goals of social media and of community building, using my work with a non-profit as an example case study. As you begin to develop your strategy, creating and empowering advocates should be the core of your social media activities, and that core is strengthened through a variety of tactics. Having an active Facebook page may help you turn gym members into passionate advocates, but the real process starts offline, within the walls of the gym.

On this front, Junior Achievement was well ahead of most organizations turning to social media to boost the impact of their marketing efforts. Junior Achievement has been working in the community for decades, and their alumni are sprinkled across the world. They are reasonably well-known and respected, and they host numerous events for a wide range of community members. Offline, Junior Achievement’s community is thriving. It is vibrant and healthy, and everyone involved is happy and passionate about the organization. Their social media was weak because they had not made the effort to make their online presence match their rich physical presence

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Is Your Gym Using Social Media to Effectively Attract and Retain Students?

Check out my latest article series in BJJWeekly:

Junior Achievement is an international non-profit that teaches children about business and financial literacy. They foster entrepreneurism and teach money management. Their programs have been proven to increase scholastic performance and reduce dropout rates, and they do a lot of good for the communities connected to their respective chapters, but with federal funding becoming increasingly sparse, Junior Achievement is relying more and more on fundraising to keep their doors open and their programs alive.

I recently helped the Western Pennsylvania chapter of Junior Achievement use social media to generate awareness for one of its largest annual fundraisers: a raffle for a package of season tickets for a variety of Pittsburgh sports teams. We boosted revenue by 9% over the previous year, and from the point that we launched the social media portion of the campaign to the time that the fundraiser ended, we raised $60,000.

Matt Benyon and the New Scramble Wave Gi

Scramble as a fight wear company has been around. You have seen their gear. You have seen their blog posts. They push to create truly unique jiu-jitsu products, and their creative flair caught my eye. I wanted to know more, so I got in touch with Matt Benyon, Scramble's founder, and talked to him about his company.

Marshal Carper: Tell me about Scramble. Where did the idea to start a gi company come from and how did you decide the direction of the company?

Matt Benyon: We started out as a t-shirt company. I'd been making t-shirts here and there for my BJJ team when I was in Japan. When I came back to the UK, the economy was in tatters and I couldn't get the career I wanted. It became the perfect catalyst for striking out on my own. My school friend Ben soon came on board and between us we steer the Scramble ship. (That's not prison lingo by the way.)

Skip the Line: How I Beat the System and Got Published

Much of my writing has been on fighting. I found a niche in writing about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and mixed martial arts, and the sport has been good to me. It’s given me a way of life, and it has supported me emotionally as well as financially. Living the sport has taught to me to view the world through a warrior lens, and I have realized that there are many fights outside of the cage worth writing about, and these are the sorts of fights we face every day.

These are the fights for rights, for business, for a better tomorrow.

An example of a fight outside of the cage: publishing a book. Thousands of people are aspiring writers, and agents and publishers are inundated with unsolicited manuscripts. This is the status quo, and this is why publishing a book is hard. When you submit a manuscript, you become just another stack of papers in an ever growing pile of papers. The trick is to get noticed. To get your one shot to prove to someone that matters that you have something worth publishing.

In my case, I sent out over 200 proposals to agents and publishers. Of 200 submitted proposals, I received zero rejection letters. Nothing. I was shoveling manuscripts into a black hole. With no feedback, I had no idea why my work was rejected. Was my writing sloppy? Was the story a bad fit for the publishers? Did I fail to clearly define the target market? I could not answer these questions, and thus, I could not intelligently readjust my strategy.